Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an application layer protocol that facilitates the exchange of management information between network devices. SNMP enables network administrators to manage network performance, find and solve network problems, and plan for network growth. In SNMP version 1 (SNMPv1) and SNMP version 2c (SNMPv2c) requests from authenticated communities are considered. Each community is associated with a community profile which indicates whether the community has, for example, read-only (RO) access rights or read-write (RW) access rights to managed data. The managed data is structured in accordance with a Management Information Base (MIB). In some case, the managed data may be referred to as MIB data.
Because the SNMP access rights are associated with the entire community, knowledge of the community name alone can give intruders access to the managed data. Furthermore, SNMP access rights are defined coarsely for the entire community (as either RO or RW) and apply uniformly to all objects in an MIB view.